Ecological Modeling (FOR 8515)

Deterministic

Scientific Determinism: "The structure of the world is such that any
event can be rationally predicted, with any desired degree of precision,
if we are given a sufficiently precise description of past events,
together with all the laws of nature." Karl Popper, 1982

"All relations can be classified as either deterministic or stochastic.
A relation between X and Y is deterministic if each
element of the domain is paired off with just one element of the range.
That is, a relationship between X and Y characterized as
y=f(x) is a deterministic relation if for each value of X
there is only one corresponding value of Y." Jan Kmenta,
1971

Deterministic

Mixed Deterministic-Stochastic

Stochastic

"Most people are not natural-born statisticians. Left to our own devices
we are not very good at picking out patterns from a sea of nosiy data.
To put it another way, we are all too good at picking out non-existent
patterns that happen to suit our purposes." Efron aand Tibshirani, 1993

Also see:

Efron, B. and R. J. Tibshirani. 1993. An introduction to the bootstrap. Chapman and Hall, New York. 436 pp.